Amazon Drops S3 Prices By Up To 22%, EBS By Up To 50%, Launches New EC2 Instance Types

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Barely a month passes without Amazon Web Services (AWS) dropping the price of something in its feature line-up, and this week, it’s S3‘s and EBS‘s time to get a bit cheaper. In addition, Amazon is launching two new SSD-based, general-purpose M3 instance types.

The new M3 medium and large instances start at $0.113 per hour and are meant as replacements for the older and slower M1 instances the company has been offering for a while. AWS introduced the M3 instance type last year and the company argues that these instances offer the right balance between CPU power, RAM and networking capacity needed to run a wide variety of applications. By default, the new medium instance type offers 4GB of SSD storage, 3.75 GiB of RAM and one virtual CPU, so you definitely won’t be running any CPU- or memory-intensive applications on these. The large variety comes with 32 GB of SSD storage, seven GiB of RAM and two virtual CPUs.

The new instance types are now available in all AWS regions, with the exception of the AWS GovCloud.

For users who need a very large amount of S3 storage, Amazon is dropping the prices of its cloud storage service pretty dramatically. For storage that exceeds 5,000TB, AWS will drop prices by 22 percent. For everybody else, the reductions aren’t quite as large, but even then, users who need under a terabyte will save 11 percent, those with between one and 50TB on S3 will save 6 percent in that tier and around 15 percent for all other tiers up to 5,000TB. These reductions will take place on February 1.

Elastic Block Storage, too, is going to see a large price reduction per GB/month of provisioned storage and I/O requests that are as high as 50 percent in some regions. These, too, will go into effect on February 1.